At SXSW 2026 this March, I shared a Teachable stage with a panel of people who teach for a living. One of them was Sundas Khalid, and she said something I keep coming back to. She tells her video editor to leave the mistakes in.
When I am recording a video and I mess up, I tell my editor, don't cut it up, leave it in. I want those bloopers in there. If my camera is falling, I want that in there. I want people to know this is a real me.
It sounds like a small production note. It is really a whole philosophy, and it fits everything about how she got to that stage.
From high school dropout to a leadership role at Google
Sundas left high school in 2004. She spent about six years out of formal education before she enrolled at North Seattle College in 2010, then transferred to the University of Washington and graduated as valedictorian in 2014. She was the first woman in her family to finish college. From there she taught herself into big tech, first at Amazon and today as a Principal Analytics Lead at Google, working on experimentation and analytics for Search and Shopping.
She also teaches. More than a million people follow her work explaining data science, AI, and tech careers in plain language, and she has been featured by Forbes and Business Insider. So when someone with that resume decides to keep the falling camera in the shot, it is worth asking why.
Why she leaves the bloopers in
Her reasoning is about the moment we are in. As she put it on the panel, English is her second language, and there are words she stumbles over. For the life of her, she said, she cannot say Massachusetts. A few years ago she might have cut every slip. Now she keeps them, because polished and perfect has started to read as fake.
She is right. AI can generate a flawless talking head in seconds. When everything is smooth, smooth stops being a signal of effort or expertise. The thing a machine still cannot fake well is the small, specific, slightly awkward evidence that a real person is on the other side. The stumble is the proof.
This was the through line of the whole conversation, which I wrote about in my notes from the SXSW stage. Trust is the scarce thing now, and trust is built by people, not by production value.
What this means if you build a brand or a following
You do not have to drop your standards to use this. You have to move them. Stop spending your energy sanding off every rough edge, and start spending it on saying something true that only you can say. Keep the take where you laughed. Keep the part where you corrected yourself. Show the work, not just the result.
Sundas built real authority the slow way, then chose to stay human on camera anyway. In a year when anyone can generate a perfect video, that choice is the whole advantage. You can follow her work on her website, and you can watch the full panel below.
